A blog on the current crises in the Middle East and news accounts unpublished by the US press. Daily timeline of events in Iraq as collected from stories and dispatches in the French and Italian media: Le Monde (Paris), Il Corriere della Sera (Milan), La Repubblica (Rome), L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut) and occasionally from El Mundo (Madrid).

Sunday, June 17, 2007

General Taguba Ousted

I haven't seen a peep in the US press about the interview given by General Antonia Taguba, who wrote the report on Abu Ghraib prison scandal, but Don Rumsfeld ousted him from the US Army for collaborating....the truth! Not just transferred...but ousted!

In an article on General Taguba in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh, the general says that everyone knew full well about the abuses at Abu Ghraib and did nothing to stop them (one supposes that characters like Wolfowitz even encouraged them). General Taguba also says that Rumsfeld lied to Congress about it. A

A Seymour Hersh interview with General Anthony Taguba, who investigated Abu Ghraib, confirms details of the abuse not previously public. It also confirms that the torture was sanctioned from the top. Not quoted here, but General Janis Karpinski has testified that she saw a memorandum on "Interrogation techniques" pinned to the wall by military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, signed by Donald Rumsfeld himself. Karpinski was at the top of the line of command of the guards - the military police - but not the interrogators. Taguba here notes that Rumsfeld not only denied advance knowledge, but even tried afterwards to deny having seen Taguba's report or knowing what had happened.

2 Comments:

BG Karpinski had been in the POW command bussiness for years. She commanded a brigade headquartere that was speciaized to command POW operations. She was the senior expert in theater on POW operations.

She did not raise red flags about the many failures to run a proper operation, which if they did not have knowledge from another source is a legal defense for her superiors.

MG Taguba’s investigation made clear she was making no effort to properly run her brigade of inform her superiors of problems most of which were at the basic level.

Since the incdent broke she has done nothing except try to put the blaim for her failures on others. While the charges she makes may be true, her testimony is worthless because she would say the same thing whether it was true or not.

While it may not rise above the level of extreme asininity the restrictions imposed by Runsfeld troop levels and reserve deployment set that command up for failure. Long after it was clear they did not have the resources for the mission she didn’t not even file a pro forma letter with her boss asking for resources or an investigation.

Of course, if your interpretation is right, the reason she got a away with a minor slap on the wrist was to buy her silence.